Fault Lines by Kendel Hippolyte (review)

One way poets prove their authority is through mining a dual voice in which their vernacular and their learned language forge an unexpected music in the same poem. It is through this synthesis the poet achieves what T. S. Eliot terms the “auditory imagination”: a place wherein the poet “fuses the old and obliterated … and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.” To possess this fusion, this simultaneity of then and now, Eliot says there must be a “sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to an origin and bringing something back”; in other words, an immersion, whether mythical or real, into a historic lineage the poet can claim. The history of the Caribbean has given the Caribbean poet an island of vestigial worlds, most ancient and civilized deposits that accrue to a language only when the landscape is allowed to utter itself. Thus the ur-language in the Caribbean, the origin the poet returns to and brings something back, is in the poet’s “native air, / [in] his own ground,” to use a phrase out of Alexander Pope. It is this nonverbal province Kendel Hippolyte attempts to articulate in Fault Lines. It is a collection that is kin to a peculiar “subterraneous music,” to a kinetic, primordial mode:

a sound that’s not soundthrough my feet to my headi shake out the dreadi dance the unsounddance to the unsound

These lines plough down into the ground. The rhymes thud and expand along the plane of the opened vowel sounds and recapitulating words; it is a total aural activity, flowing undammed in its sensual fabric before the auditory pattern reveals a shade of terror. The terror radiates from the negative qualifier “not,” which ricochets to the repeated prefix “un-,” between which the dancer is a staff (or stave) caught between two absent sounds. The dancer is in a knot, the dancer is a knot, for the sound that travels through his feet to his head, essentially roots, has given him roots: the “dread”—short for knotty/natty dreadlocks—he shakes out. And if those with kindred ears hear “dryad” in “dread,” then the dancer is something insubstantial: it is sap, not blood, that runs through his veins. The terror here, the most terrifying, is that he suffers the risk of becoming a fetish.

The strength of the collection is the poet’s ability to give the landscape a dialect and then the poet’s skill to claim that dialect as his own vernacular, his original tongue. It is through an accurate, geological eye for the landscape that the cadence of “height calling still to height” and what is below the surface of the beautiful St. Lucian landscape is heard and freshly communicated. In poem after poem, Hippolyte listens to his “crack-toothed, weatherbeaten” region indulge a kind of ultra pastoral, sickening on itself at times:

it’s true: this land, which after rainfall chews down chunks of roadinto its gorges and heaves its hawked-up sputa onto gouged asphalt,does not know man. This fraying rag of road, those scattered chips of houses

In lines like these the description is boosted by the liturgical syntax that enacts the fractured and fracturing nature of the landscape. Indeed, there is a strong poetry of severance in the book: it is the thematic whole of the collection’s title. But as much as there is fracture, it is this liturgical breadth, in the longer poems, that makes one read not with the sense that the poems are arranged fragments, but that there is a uniform orchestration, a narrative arc in which tectonic plates keep shaking, jarring lines. Consider the beginning of “Going”:

Along the Sunday morning road, west coast, uphill from Canaries to Soufriere, / my son asks from the backseat: “Daddy, where are we?”And, reaching to pluck a name and finding none, i slip,falling in a crevasse, the meaning of the question, the meaningof my not having an answer, rushing upward past meas i clutch at blurred-green...